Emergency Contact(46)



“I haven’t seen my mom in a while either.”

“Where does she live?”

“Here.”

“Austin?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

They sat in silence for a bit.

“What’s yours called? Mine’s a Celeste.”

“Brandi Rose.”

Well, as names go Sam’s mom’s didn’t not belong to a stripper.

Penny checked for the mom dossier she had filed in her head. She carefully put “Brandi Rose,” “alcoholic,” and “not Sam’s emergency contact” in there.

“What’s a Celeste like?”

“Well, her birthday’s coming up. That’s a whole thing. There was this one year she accidentally double booked dates with two different guys. While she was out to dinner, the second dude came to the house and I thought he was a murderer. Good times.”

Sam laughed.

“How is that not the plot of an eighties movie?”

“I felt bad. I made the guy wait in his car and he had these flowers. It was the worst.”

“When was this?”

“It was before she had a cell phone, so I was eight?”

“And you didn’t have a sitter?”

Penny tried to think about the last time she had a sitter. They didn’t really do that at her house.

“Let’s just say when I was little and my mom was out, I’d go to bed with a ketchup bottle.”

“I already love this story so much. . . .”

“It was a foolproof plan. If the bad guys came in I could douse myself and they wouldn’t kill me because I was already dead.”

“Jesus, I can’t tell if that’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard or the absolute most sad.”

“Both?”

“God, I keep picturing tiny you in the dark frantically hitting the fifty-seven on the Heinz bottle and it not coming out.”

Penny laughed.

“I guess it’s cute and sad. What about Brandi Rose? Any cute-sads to share?”

“Well, Brandi Rose had this thing . . .”





SAM.


Sam didn’t know why he called. Only that he wanted to talk to her, like, actually talk to her, and more importantly, he wanted to hear her.

He hadn’t planned on bringing up his mom. He certainly hadn’t intended to divulge the story of the Worst Night and Morning of His Life. That night was about as country song as things got. In the fateful collection of hours, he’d lost his girl, his home, and his family. But Penny asked and he wanted to answer.

“What about Brandi Rose? Any cute-sads to share?”

Sam loved hearing Penny’s voice and the deep scratchy way she laughed. But, man, he should’ve peed before he called. Instead he settled onto his side and drew the comforter up. He felt as if he were at a sleepover.

“Well, Brandi Rose had this thing where she loved nothing more than watching the Home Shopping Network.”

It was true. It didn’t matter if it was a collapsible cross-country ski machine, an oil-free deep fryer, or a unisex sweater that also turned into a staircase for your dog. If it was peddled on the TV, Sam’s mom wanted it. The habit worsened after Mr. Lange divorced her, but everyone has hobbies and window-shopping through the one-eyed babysitter was hers. The trouble was that his mom was addicted to ordering it. The lot of it. Late at night.

That night—the Worst Night and Morning of Sam’s Life—Sam and Lorraine were torched on gin martinis. He’d suspected she was cheating on him, only he didn’t have proof past a gut feeling. He figured, stupidly, that a night on the town would be romantic, but then he ran out of cash. Sam headed home to pick up a few things, prize among them a small, stemmy stash of weed he’d left in his sock drawer, figuring he’d crash at Lorraine’s after, as he always did.

When Sam opened the door to his mom’s, he was taken aback by the smell, the way garbage stinks of rotting orange peels no matter what’s in it. He didn’t want to bring Lorraine in except that she needed to pee.

“Heya, Brandiiiiiii,” sang Lorraine, peeking from behind the door as she walked in. She burst out laughing when his mother glared at them from her chair in the front room. It had been weeks since Sam was home, and he was startled by the squalor. Without him to tidy, dirty dishes had stacked up. There were empty take-out boxes on every surface, and there was mail strewn on the floor that nobody had bothered to pick up.

Coming home after a night out had been a bad idea. Lorr was wearing a bra as a shirt, and Sam’s embarrassment for everyone ignited into a bright white rage. When he slid on a collection of crinkly envelopes, which made Lorraine cackle again, he snatched them up to discover they were addressed to him. Slender white envelopes stamped with angry red threats.

“She’d been opening up these credit cards in my name and running up thousands of dollars on junk,” he said.

“Jesus.”

“How white trash is that?” He cringed as he said it. He hated that term.

Penny didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

“My mom lives in a trailer,” he said. “I lived in a trailer.”

“People live in trailers.”

Sam wished he could see Penny’s face. Though if it had registered pity or . . . disgust . . . it would’ve destroyed some part of him. Lorraine dumped him the morning after.

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